first light with my DIY modded 400D

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

colour balance is a little off and I was perhaps a little heavy-handed with the saturation (but at ~2am on a 'school night' its good enough for now), however i think this shows the potential of the mod.

Both stock UV/IR filter and anti-alias filter removed. Astronomik L (EOS-clip) now fitted instead.

15 x 1min subs @ ISO800. 15 darks, no flats
8" f4 GSO imaging newt + MPCC on EQ6. unguided

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

i should probably add that its only my second evening of prime focus deep-sky AP, so im still very much a beginner.

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

You've got one helleva "FULL" spectrum modded camera there!!
You seem to have the same set-up as I have on the 1000D for spectroscopy......
First light images are great! Well done....

[midnight (Darrin)]

Huge potential.

For 1 minute subs and what appears to be no tracking issues (1minute should be good anyway) you have done really well.

Looking forward to more!!!

Darrin...

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

That set up will turn out very well with practice.

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

thanks for the encouragement

i've only had the imaging rig for a couple of weeks, so still very much learning the ropes. Having some issues with my new guide cam which has meant i've gone unguided so far, and polar alignment is still taking me a while even with alignmaster which is eating into my available imaging time (although i got it to an AZ/ALT error of ~ 17" which helped limit the tracking errors somewhat).

That said, i'm *very* happy with my results so far, and i'm pretty excited by the potential for some cracking images in the future once (as Rowland said above) I get some more practice with my gear and the various software processing tools available.

Attached is another image with this new rig from last night, this time with 20x2min subs @ ISO800 and 30 darks using BackyardEOS (much more reliable than EOS Utility), then DSS followed by Darktable (linux version of Adobe Lightroom)